North America’s largest film festival opens today in Toronto with a wide-ranging trove of new movies and a spotlight on global conflicts and baby boomers’ mortality.
We’ve seen these kinds of subjects treated in films before but we’re hoping to go beyond the initial description of a conflict and offer deeper insights into what is going on
“It’s our most diverse slate ever, with 72 countries represented,” Toronto International Film Festival co-director Cameron Bailey said. There are many new film-makers presenting this year too, as well as 146 world premieres.
This year Toronto firsts include Ben Affleck’s Argo, which looks back at the storming of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, and English Vinglish, which marks the comeback of India’s biggest female star, Sridevi.
It will also include the family drama Silver Linings Playbook, from The Fighter director David Russell, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, as well as Caught in the Web, a cyber-bullying drama by Chen Kaige.
Bailey noted that many film-makers this year have focused their lenses on recent unrest in Sri Lanka, the Middle East and elsewhere. The Toronto film festival, also for the first time, has scheduled talks after each screening with experts, such as political scientist Janice Stein and former Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff.
“We’ve seen these kinds of subjects treated in films before but we’re hoping to go beyond the initial description of a conflict and offer deeper insights into what is going on,” Bailey said.
He pointed to a documentary portrait of a man who escapes a North Korean labour camp in Camp 14 – Total Control Zone, the quest for UN recognition of Palestine in State 194 and candid interviews with former heads of Israel’s intelligence and security agency Shin Bet in The Gatekeepers.
If global conflicts seem too heavy to go with popcorn and soda, there is also an increasing number of films about ageing and death, largely attributable to baby boomers growing older and “facing their own mortality,” Bailey said.
In this category, Dustin Hoffman will be in town for the unveiling of his new film Quartet, about a string quartet’s future hanging in the balance after a member is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.
Closing night film Song For Marion also touches on the end of life, casting Vanessa Redgrave in the role of a curmudgeonly retiree’s beloved wife who falls ill.
The smash success of music documentaries – following last year’s focus on U2, Pearl Jam and Neil Young – has spawned a similar series this year. Artifact follows Jared Leto and his band Thirty Seconds to Mars as they battle their record label. Reincarnated follows rapper Snoop Dogg – now known as Snoop Lion – as he comes to embrace reggae, and a new Spike Lee film looks at the making of Michael Jackson’s Bad album 25 years on, in Bad 25.
The festival opens this evening with the futuristic time-bending action thriller Looper, starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt, and runs through September 16, showcasing 289 feature films and 83 shorts.
The industry is still “clawing its way back” from the 2008 recession, which saw a significant drop in film distribution rights at the Toronto film festival, according to Bailey.